Tech stuff worth sharing

SlingPlayer running on AppleTV

I absolutely love my AppleTV, the kids love watching photos and home movies, video podcasts, etc – we love rarely having to go to Blockbuster to rent movies, and we also love having complete control over our family’s television viewing (we canceled our cable and save that money and avoid the junk out there, occasionally buying a show to watch…wished they would lower the cost down from 1.99, but oh well! we spend time as a family doing other things.)

With our cable cancelled, we have a slingbox for those must-see shows, foxnews, and recorded programs. We watch it on our iMac and even have connected my MacbookPro to our 50″ plasma TV for the important stuff.

I have been wishing we could watch our slingbox on our AppleTV and finally we can!! I have been following this thread and finally greg Rice posted easy to follow instructions how to do this: How_to_install_SlingPlayer_on_AppleTV. Thanks greg!!!

It works! I did not do the reset he suggested and did not need the recovery.dmg. Also I had to create the folders Applications and Documents in the frontrow user folder on the ATV. I was tripped up a little at first when I didn’t see the mouse and the keyboard didn’t work…until I realized you don’t see these until you launch SlingPlayer and focus is on the MultiFinder.

A tip: I was able to change window position to center it by changing the window position of slingplayer on my macbook, exporting preferences and importing those preferences on the slingplayer on ATV (after copying that exported file to the ATV of course). I tried having it startup in full screen but that caused occasional crashes.

One last note: sound does not come out through my optical out, but it did come through the HDMI connection to the TV.

I manually edited the pref file on my Mac and copied it back over to the ATV, setting it to full screen at startup. But like I mentioned, this caused crashes, so I decided to leave it as non full screen, but centered the video. I don’t switch to full screen after launching it, so I don’t need the mouse or keyboard connected to it anymore after setup.

About

This is my humble attempt at returning a tiny thing back to the opensource community out there for all the great products coming out. I hope some of my notes here will help answer someone’s question out there as I try to share my experiences in these tech notes.